SPOOKS: a dystopia

Is someone messing with your sense of reality? Do you really know what’s going on, or have you lost a sense of what’s real or fake, what’s right or wrong?

Set in the near future, the story of SPOOKS is not about a person, but rather an encompassing system. The protagonist is a young woman in debt and in poverty, when she is suddenly plucked from the crowd by the right sort of people. Her unique outlook on the world propels her towards success. Omnipresent technology is welcomed as the world becomes a lonelier place without it precisely because everyone is using it.

Caroline Benjie becomes a journalist more focused on herself than her subject, but this is what sells in an attention economy generating an endlessly diverting, vacuous spectacle which involves all the dwellers above its dungeons, via social media, in a narcissistic dance of ambition and performance. The evermore powerful police state goes unnoticed as people can no longer see the world around them without corporate mediation. Narcissism, self-promotion and disposable ethics are key to the only job that pays anymore – celebrity.

E.M. Quangel's debut is a rough dystopic satirical spy novel, both hilarious and chilling as it dissects fame, fascism, revolution and reaction in a future that closely resembles our present day environment.